HashiCorp Consul, Nomad, Boundary and Packer licensing covers four HashiCorp products. Consul does service networking and Nomad orchestrates workloads. Boundary provides secure remote access, and Packer builds machine images.[11] Consul, Nomad and Boundary have self-managed Enterprise editions. HashiCorp prices these by quote and enforces them with licence files and utilization reports.[11] Boundary and Packer are also sold as hosted HCP services with published usage prices.[11] The contractual unit for an Enterprise edition is whatever the Order Form states. The General Terms define Entitlements as “the metrics and quantities under which the Products are licensed or provided”.[13] The community editions of all four products are released under the Business Source License (see HashiCorp Business Source License).
Editions
| Product | Self-managed | HCP service (published “starting at” price)[11] |
|---|---|---|
| Consul | Consul Enterprise, custom pricing, Premium support included. Standard includes service discovery; Premium adds service mesh[11] | None listed |
| Nomad | Nomad Enterprise, custom pricing[11] | None listed |
| Boundary | Boundary Enterprise, custom pricing, Premium support included[11] | HCP Boundary Essentials: USD 23.96 per user per month; Standard: USD 47.92 per user per month; Silver support included |
| Packer | None listed | HCP Packer Essentials: USD 0.010 per image bucket per hour; Standard: USD 0.034 per image bucket per hour; both plus USD 0.011 per request per month |
Consul Enterprise licence types
Consul Enterprise needs an Enterprise licence on its agents. There are two kinds (catalog rule):[1]
- Consul Self-Managed Standard supports service discovery features.
- Consul Self-Managed Premium supports service mesh features.
The edition table explains why the choice matters for compliance. Consul Community Edition includes service mesh on a single cluster, API gateways and ingress/terminating gateways. Standard Enterprise does not include these features, and Premium Enterprise does. Both Enterprise licences add multi-tenancy, multiple runtime support, extra resiliency and FIPS 140-3 compliance.[1] An organization that moves a mesh deployment from Community Edition to Enterprise therefore needs Premium, not Standard.
Metrics
HashiCorp publishes no per-unit definition for the Consul, Nomad or Boundary Enterprise subscriptions. What it documents is the data each product reports for licence utilization:
- Consul Enterprise reports the counters consul.billable.nodes and consul.billable.service_instances (metric row).[3]
- Nomad Enterprise reports nomad.billable.clients (“Number of client nodes in the cluster”), nomad.billable.cores.total (“Active client CPU cores in the cluster”) and nomad.billable.cores.s390x for s390x cores (metric row).[6] When product usage metrics are disabled, only the nomad.billable.* metrics are collected.[6]
- Boundary has a billing monthly-active-users command that returns the number of monthly active users for a period, “to help predict billing information”.[9]
The HCP services have published definitions. An HCP Boundary User is any human or machine identity taking an authenticated action to HCP Boundary.[10] An HCP Packer Image Bucket is a unique HCP Packer configuration file tracked by the registry. An HCP Packer Request is a query to the get channel API that fetches the assigned iteration, including through the Terraform data source.[10]
Counting / floors
HCP Boundary. Each user counts once for each month in which it takes an authenticated action. The monthly rate depends on the edition (catalog rule).[10] Service or non-human accounts “cannot be used to artificially reduce HCP Boundary Users”.[10] In the monthly-active-users command, the start month is included in the results and the end month is not.[9]
HCP Packer. Image buckets are charged per hour, rounded up to the nearest hour, from when their metadata is stored until it is deleted. The rate depends on edition and on the total number of buckets in the billing hour.[10] Requests are charged per request. Requests generated by the HCP Packer user interface are not billed.[10] HCP Packer tracks image metadata across clouds but does not host image templates or artifacts.[10]
Trial limits. While an HCP organization is in trial status, it is limited to three resources of each service type, such as an HCP Boundary cluster or an HCP Packer registry.[14]
Utilization reporting. Consul Enterprise and Nomad Enterprise send utilization reports automatically over HTTPS to reporting.hashicorp.services, roughly every 24 hours for Nomad.[3][6] Opting out of automated reporting is not an opt-out from reporting. Customers who opt out “are still required to manually collect and send license utilization metrics to HashiCorp” (catalog rule).[3] For Nomad, manual reports are made with the nomad operator utilization command.[6] Consul has the consul operator utilization command.[3] Under the General Terms, usage above the Entitlements must be reported to IBM. It is then added and co-termed to the Order Form at list price unless the Order Form says otherwise.[13]
Virtualization & partitioning
Licence files are not tied to a host.
- Consul. Server agents need the licence when they start, from the license_path setting or the CONSUL_LICENSE or CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH environment variable. Client agents and snapshot agents can fetch it from the servers over RPC if ACLs are enabled. Virtual agents do not need a licence to run.[2]
- Nomad. Only Nomad server nodes need the licence present, plus agents started with -dev.[5] Licences “can be reused on different nodes and different clusters” (catalog rule).[5]
- Boundary. The licence is set on the controller, through the BOUNDARY_LICENSE environment variable or the license attribute of the controller block.[8]
Reuse of the licence file does not change the quantity bought. The Nomad and Consul utilization reports count client nodes, CPU cores, nodes and service instances across the cluster.[3][6]
Cloud / BYOL
Enterprise editions are self-managed and may run on premises or in a cloud of the customer’s choosing under the Self-Managed Product Supplement (see HashiCorp licensing). HCP Boundary and HCP Packer are hosted services billed through PAYG or Flex Multiyear.[10] The Consul, Nomad and Boundary Enterprise documentation says the licence configuration also applies to licences obtained through IBM Passport Advantage Online.[2][4][8]
Licence expiry
Expiry behaviour differs by product:
- Nomad Enterprise. The licensing page says that when a licence expires, enterprise functionality becomes limited: only read operations on enterprise endpoints work.[4] From 1.6.0, “non-terminating” contract licences are checked against the build date of the binary, not the current date (catalog rule).[5] Versions built before expiry keep working indefinitely, but newer binaries will not start. Trial licences still stop at expiry.[5] A Nomad Enterprise cluster cannot be downgraded to the open-source version.[4]
- Boundary Enterprise. The licence carries an expiration date based on the contract. Boundary logs warnings 30 days, 7 days, 24 hours, 1 hour and 1 minute before expiry, then performs a graceful shutdown when the licence expires (catalog rule).[8]
- Consul Enterprise. A licence must be available when an agent starts. A client agent that cannot retrieve one from the servers within 5 minutes shuts itself down.[2]
Programs
The HCP services use the PAYG and Flex Multiyear billing models. A new HCP organization starts with USD 500 in trial credits.[14] For self-managed support, the last LTS versions are Consul Enterprise v1.21 and Nomad Enterprise v1.10.x (both to April 2027) and Boundary Enterprise v0.21 (to December 2027). Later releases follow IBM’s Support Cycle-2.[12] From Nomad 2.0.0, version numbers follow IBM’s Version-Modification-Fix model. Extended Support and Ongoing Extended Support are optional paid packages for Enterprise customers.[7]
Out of scope
This article does not cover the community editions of Consul, Nomad, Boundary and Packer, Consul-Terraform-Sync licensing, HashiCorp Waypoint, or Vagrant and its VMware provider plugin. Self-managed contract prices are also excluded, because HashiCorp does not publish them.[11]